Investment

The overall objective of this Post-Doctoral Fellowship is to reduce the adverse impact of weeds on grain yield as well as their associated control costs through the use and appropriate management of annual pasture phases. On many Australian farms, profitability and durability would greatly benefit from phase farming, in which a multi-year cropping phase is disrupted by a multi-year pasture phase that builds nitrogen, rapidly exhausts weed seed banks and decimates soil-borne crop pathogens. This project will compare the paddock management practices of growers using pasture phases with growers that have little rotational diversity and correlating paddock management practices with the weed seed bank size in the Western Australian wheatbelt. Seedbank evaluation on these selected farms will quantify the effectiveness of disruptive pasture phases in achieving low weed seed banks.